Matt Gaetz will move to oust McCarthy as speaker
after deal to avert shutdown
Far-right Florida congressman tells CNN he will seek
to ‘rip the Bandaid off’ after deal with Democrats to fund government
Richard
Luscombe
@richlusc
Sun 1 Oct
2023 14.59 BST
A move to
oust Kevin McCarthy as House speaker could come as early as Monday, the Florida
congressman Matt Gaetz said on Sunday, as Republican extremists plotted revenge
for McCarthy’s bipartisan deal with Democrats to avoid a government shutdown.
“We need to
rip off the Bandaid. We need to move on with new leadership that can be
trustworthy,” Gaetz said on CNN’s State of the Union, saying he would file a
“motion to vacate” sometime this week. The House sits at noon on Monday.
McCarthy,
Gaetz said, lied about “a secret deal” he claimed was struck with Democrats to
later pass money for Ukraine that was left out of the compromise bill, and that
he misled Republicans about working with Democrats in the first place to get
the shutdown bill through.
McCarthy’s
stopgap bill keeping the government funded for 45 days passed the House on
Saturday night 335-91, with 209 Democrats joining 126 Republicans in supporting
the legislation. It cleared the Senate 88-9 and was signed into law by Joe
Biden.
“The one
thing everybody has in common is that nobody trusts Kevin McCarthy,” Gaetz, a
member of the rightwing House Freedom Caucus said.
“He lied to
Biden, he lied to House conservatives. He had appropriators marking to a
different number altogether. And the reason we were backed up against the
shutdown politics is not a bug of the system. It’s a feature.”
Gaetz said
he would no longer hold to an agreement made in January to support McCarthy for
speaker in exchange for, among other concessions, a hard conservative position
on federal funding. That deal included a loosening of House rules that would
allow a single member to file a motion to vacate, the beginning of the process
to remove a speaker.
“The only
way Kevin McCarthy is speaker of the House at the end of this coming week is if
Democrats bail him out, and they probably will,” said Gaetz.
“I’m done
owning Kevin McCarthy. We made a deal in January to allow him to assume the
speakership and I’m not owning him anymore because he doesn’t tell the truth.
And so if Democrats want to own Kevin McCarthy by bailing him out I can’t stop
them. But then he’ll be their speaker, not mine.”
Relations
between the speaker and Gaetz reached a new low with a testy confrontation in a
closed meeting on Thursday.
Gaetz
accused McCarthy of orchestrating a social media campaign against him, the
speaker replying he did not rate the congressman highly enough to do so. In his
Sunday interview, Gaetz insisted “this is about keeping Kevin McCarthy to his
word, it’s not about any personal animosity”.
On
Saturday, after the bill passed, McCarthy remained defiant.
“If
somebody wants to make a motion against me, bring it,” he told reporters.
“There has to be an adult in the room. I am going to govern with what is best
for this country.”
Gaetz
claimed McCarthy had reached a “secret deal” that would save his speakership
and keep the government open, promising to introduce a standalone bill to
continue funding Ukraine’s efforts to repel the Russian military invasion.
A growing
number of Republicans object to the US continuing to help pay for the Ukraine
war. No money was included for Ukraine in the stopgap bill, to Democrats’
disappointment, but Gaetz said it was part of the horse trading that allowed
the shutdown bill to pass.
“As he was
baiting Republicans to vote for a continuing resolution without Ukraine money,
saying that we were going to jam the Senate on Ukraine, he then turns around
and makes a secret deal,” Gaetz said.
“However
you think about [Ukraine funding], it should be subject to open, review
analysis, and not backroom deals, so I have to file a motion to vacate against
speaker McCarthy this week.
In scathing
comments to CNN on Sunday, Alexandra Ocasio-Ortez, a Democratic congresswoman
from New York, said she would not vote to save McCarthy’s speakership if it
came to a vote in the House, where he would need 218 votes to survive.
“Kevin
McCarthy is very weak speaker,” she said. “He clearly has lost control of his
caucus. He has brought the US and millions of Americans to the brink waiting
until the final hour to keep the government open and even then only issuing a
45-day extension.
“We’re
going to be right back in this place in November.”
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário